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E-Learning From (Yet Another) New Angle
March 10, 2009
You've had e-learning for years now, but have you tried it using a content-as-a-service model?
By Lee Wright
As many learning and training administrators can attest, content is the oft-neglected piece of an organization's learning strategy, with application functionality taking precedence over the content being delivered. Many organizations purchase a Learning Management System (LMS), work through the implementation, and then just before go-live, realize they need to address and incorporate online content. Typically, organizations recognize that they may not know where all their content resides. Each department may have content in department-specific locations, possibly on departmental servers, with no centrally managed catalog of an organization's total courseware. Coupled with this decentralized storage approach, there is little control over the types or quality of content available for an organization's end users.
LMS platforms historically have offered external content hosting to support the delivery of online content. Content hosting—or content storage—is a simple low-cost option for storing an organization's course catalog. Recent growth in content storage mirrors the growth in hosted applications or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models, with more organizations moving away from behind the firewall solutions. Offering easy implementations, incredible functionality, and low cost of acquisition and ownership, SaaS solutions have quickly become ubiquitous.
Organizations are now demanding the same SaaS benefits (ease of use, availability, easy deployment, lower costs, and seamless product upgrades) for online content. In a recent survey conducted by McKinsey and the Sand Hill Group, respondents cited SaaS and SaaS platforms as the most important trends impacting their businesses. In fact, 62 percent of the 857 executives surveyed responded that "software industry innovations over the past two years are nothing compared to the innovations we are about to see," and that they expect to increase the proportion of their IT budget spent on software from 31 percent in 2007 to 35 percent in 2010. SaaS growth has led organizations to focus on how to gain the same benefits of SaaS from online content.
This new model, Content-as-a-Service (CaaS), allows organizations to deliver effective and accurate online training with an improved user experience. The emergence of CaaS will bring the same benefits SaaS brought to implementing technology solutions to content hosting. With CaaS, organizations will no longer carry the burden of buying specific hardware to store content, or worry about upgrades and version changes.
Let's consider some of the questions posed by the current model of content delivery. How can a company ensure users are taking the "right" course if they do not comprehend their strategy for content delivery? Can the organization's content be hastily rounded up and thrown onto a content server, then integrated with the organization's LMS? On the surface, the situation appears handled, with content now centrally stored. Organizations may consider the problem solved, but this is far from the case.
Consider that renting or buying content storage space is analogous to purchasing a DVD rack. The rack houses all of the DVDs but does nothing to help with viewing or consuming the movie. To fully enjoy the movie experience, you need, at a minimum, a DVD player. You also can enhance your viewing experience if you have HDTV, or surround sound stereo, which are all part of the movie delivery (far beyond just storage). Applying this analogy to content, a new model evolves, CaaS. CaaS represents the entire entertainment center, handling storage, management, and delivery while improving the user experience, security, and effectiveness of online content. The experience of a movie—or e-learning courseware—is more about delivery than storage. For this reason, CaaS offers a superior solution for companies trying to use online training effectively.
Content Hosting—The Old Paradigm
Before discussing the concept of CaaS as the new model for content delivery, it is essential to explain how the limitations of the old, content storage paradigm actually perpetuate e-learning inefficiencies. The old model involved simply renting or purchasing content storage, often referred to as "a spot on a box." Content storage was typically sold by the gigabyte (GB) and was often given away by companies selling their learning management applications. Large amounts of storage space, ranging from 50 to 100 GBs, may seem like a good thing. More is better, right? Not always. In reality, the average course content requires only 20 megabytes (MBs). At space increments of 100 GBs, that is room for more than 5,100 online courses, greatly exceeding most organizations’=; content libraries. This "free space" may succeed as a sales tool because it appears to remove an obstacle, but it actually perpetuates problems by failing to address issues around content management and delivery. This solution is inadequate for today’s online training needs, and may trigger several critical problems by not providing adequate support for launch and delivery, security, inventory, or updates. Below, I'll briefly highlight some common issues in these areas.
Launch, Track & Delivery
Generally speaking, companies that purchase content storage to support e-learning with their LMS encounter issues as users launch and consume content. The first problem that surfaces: content will not launch. This is typically caused by a configuration issue (most commonly an incorrect file path) with how the content is referenced. Having content reside on a centrally-hosted server is a good first step, but now every LMS content data record must point to it. This requires detailed validation, content management, and configuration. Simply pushing all the content to a central server does not ensure it will launch.
If the content does launch, there is no guarantee it will behave or perform in the manner intended. This issue leads to questions around content tracking. Does the content record user stats such as time in course, scores, and completions? Is the content written to the latest AICC or SCORM standards? Such questions require in-depth content expertise to resolve. Again, just because content is centrally stored does not mean courseware is recording user interactions. Without consistent tracking, the online content is ineffective, as no user history is maintained.
Another, and perhaps more serious problem, is that content is slow to launch. User frustration over how long it takes to launch and consume a course could render even the best content useless. And spikes in user consumption can magnify bandwidth constraints. If an organization releases a course to meet a business requirement that is deadline-driven (i.e., compliance issue or end-of-year training), the dramatic increase in traffic will cause the network to slow significantly or even crash. Regardless of the cause, slow response again hurts user adoption, acceptance, and compliance with the online training, reducing the effectiveness of the intended training.
Security & Inventory
A content storage solution can provide a base level of security around who has permission to access course files stored on the server. This is a good start for internal security management as lax access restrictions can lead to unapproved deletions or additions. But a large security hole still remains. Once online content is exposed to the Internet via Web server, users accessing the content through their browser can copy the launch URL of the content. If a user can copy the URL, they can potentially send this URL to other users, all of whom would have unlimited access to the content. This "content piracy" is of concern for organizations that purchase and are granted a limited number of user licenses. It presents a content delivery cost concern, as unintended usage drives up bandwidth charges. Moreover, this model introduces numerous security risks. Unintended access of content can expose confidential materials to the world. Without a security check on the content at launch, there is no way to ensure only users who should have access to the content are the users that launch the content.
Content Updates
The last issue left unaddressed by a content storage solution is managing updates to existing content. The active management of content is vital to ensure up-to-date and accurate content. The initial move to content hosting creates a snapshot in time of accurate content. However, without updates and management, courses become obsolete. Every LMS has a workflow for loading and updating courses, but this is time consuming and requires some technical and administrative training. Often organizations are required to allocate permanent staff to upload, integrate, and “version control” their content. This is not only time consuming and expensive, it is an error-prone, highly manual process.
The New Model—Content As A Service
Clearly, for most organizations, content storage is not the answer. Without addressing delivery, management, security, and updates, online content ceases to be an effective training tool. Organizations that spend money on creating customized business-essential content, but do not invest in the necessary delivery and management of this content will severely limit their ROI.
According to Bersin & Associates, organizations will spend $1,202 per user on training, with self-study accounting for 20 percent of student training hours. To meet this demand for self-study, organizations must invest in and provide effective online content, using a CaaS model. This new model transcends the previous content storage approach by incorporating and assuring content delivery and management. For the first time, and unlike previous approaches, the CaaS model focuses on the end-user experience and content delivery rather than on GBs and storage space. Recalling the DVD analogy, CaaS provides the DVD rack, the DVD player, HDTV, surround sound stereo, and ensures everything is connected properly and works when you need it.
In its simplest form, CaaS invites users to "give us your content and we make it work." CaaS allows companies to focus on developing or purchasing content that best fits their training requirements. The hosting, management, security, tracking, and delivery are abstracted and improved as infrastructure and content experts take over all aspects of managing online training. Experts validate content launches and track increasing user acceptance and effectiveness.
In today's highly distributed business world, organizations have users that are geographically dispersed but still require global online training. Hosting training content within a CaaS infrastructure underpinned by a robust and globally distributed Content Delivery Network (CDN) assures fast and efficient content delivery. The end-user experience improves by more than 60 percent when content is hosted on a network supported by a CDN. The CDN forward-caches the content on the server that is geographically closest to the end-user, making the content available and accessible immediately. The next time this user or another authorized user launches the course, it is consumed from that cache. This allows users to bypass the network traffic back to the content server, improving user response times by 60 percent. The CDN also helps support large-spike training events that can slow or shutdown standard content servers.
CaaS solutions provide an additional layer of entitlement security to prevent unauthorized users from accessing content. This security layer allows a business to accurately manage licenses on purchased content, to better provision based on actual usage. The ability to keep an inventory across multiple business units helps prevent the purchasing of unnecessary licenses and allows managers to administer training budgets proactively.
The CaaS solution also provides flexible options for procuring new content. With the delivery and testing infrastructure in place, additional titles are readily available for purchase and deployment. A CaaS offering provides a mechanism that allows organizations and users to purchase multiple titles from multiple vendors using various payment methods. This allows organizations to expand training offerings as the business changes.
A CaaS offering also should actively manage updates to third party and custom titles. This is essential to ensure users have the latest version of content and that all online courseware functions properly. The expertise and infrastructure required to actively manage dynamic courseware is a vital benefit of the CaaS model.
The End of the Content Storage Era
Due to inherent limitations around content delivery, security, and administration, the traditional “spot on a box,” or externally hosted online content approach to online content management and delivery—to which most LMS users have become accustomed—is not a viable long-term solution. Thanks to recent advances in technology, and the trend towards SaaS delivery, users are demanding a better, faster, and more flexible way to ensure secure, effective, and accurate online training.
With the emergence of the CaaS model, previous e-learning inefficiencies, and headaches associated with content procurement, delivery, management, and administration are significantly reduced and sometimes altogether eliminated. By minimizing content overhead and administration, CaaS is delivering substantial cost savings and ensuring faster content delivery across global organizations. This new model provides the hosting infrastructure, bandwidth and delivery, management, security, and updates that content storage solutions have lacked. This type of offering solves the issues surrounding the maintenance and delivery of effective online training that have hampered organizations since the inception of e-learning. By freeing themselves from the burdens associated with the old model of content delivery, organizations can concentrate on the quality and accuracy of the online training information instead of focusing on hosting and infrastructure.
Lee Wright is senior director of services, iContent with Plateau Systems, where he leads Plateau's Content-as-a-Service strategy and solutions group. For more information, visit www.plateau.com.
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